The day Enoch exposed our Mau Mau shame

Our one-time Chancellor Denis Healey called it ‘the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard’. The speaker was Enoch Powell, the year 1959 and the topic was official attempts to gloss over murders in Kenya of captured Mau Mau insurgents by their local guards.

Of all unlikely people, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality Commission, has recalled this in a Times article headed: ‘Why Enoch is an inspiration to us all.’

Perhaps a rehabilitation programme is in train on the Left, which has always railed at Enoch since his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, as Phillips calls it, in 1968.

The 1959 speech was about the shame of accepting that different standards of justice could apply in Africa or Asia to over here. (We know even more about the disgraceful official activities in Kenya now.)

This speech, if read, does not sound like exceptional oratory, though its arguments were faultless. Healey dwells on it having ‘all the moral passion of and rhetorical force of Demosthenes’.

You needed, as so often with Enoch, to see the speaker in action to get the full force of his words. When he sat down, Enoch wept, so highly had his emotions run.

Yet, oddly enough, this speech came near to not being delivered at all. He provided me with an interesting aside on the character of former Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft, who had along with Enoch resigned from the Macmillan government over excessive public expenditure in 1958.

Some time before the Mau Mau debate, Thorneycroft had observed to him in that casual way of his that someone on the Tory side, probably himself, should avoid excuses and denounce the shameful business in Kenya.

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When Enoch said he was planning to speak, Thorneycroft’s line was: ‘Oh, well, that’s all right then — I’ll leave it all to you.’

Had Thorneycroft sent in his name to the Speaker, he would have had preference and Enoch might not have been called.

There were so many sides of Enoch which remain little known or ignored by the media.

Labour MP Harold Lever told me of the reaction of immigrants in the local party when they heard him denounce Enoch’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech: ‘Hurray, hurray! Down with Enoch Powell!’ they cried.

‘But I have to say to you,’ he went on, ‘that if any of you had a grievance with the government, no MP in the House would stand up for you better, pursuing your case with almost pedantic determination.’

The audience fell silent. They did not understand.

Shame: Captured Mau Maus, prisoners sitting with hands on top of their heads in a British prison camp

Another thing which baffled a wider audience was Enoch’s remark on TV when challenged to answer a hostile black Labour candidate whose complaints against stern immigration policies rested on the fact that he himself had married a white girl. ‘Unfortunately, that doesn’t often happen,’ came the reply from Enoch.

Bewilderment set in. I received several telephone calls from across the media, being supposed in the confidence of the great man. Had he really said he was in favour of mixed marriages?

My reply was: ‘Yes, why not?’

‘But, but, but . . .’ wailed the callers, who assumed his views were driven by sheer ‘racism’.

In fact, Enoch was keen on mixed marriages because he saw them as the only alternative to a country of mutually hostile communities. But whenever he said it, the media scratched its rather pathetic little noddle. It likes easy-to-understand and easy-to-report stereotypes, preferably which it can designate Left-wing or Right-wing.

Confusion also arose when Enoch was shadow defence secretary. As a stern realist, he was anxious that we stop behaving like an imperial power, which the Tory rank-and-file so loved. At the Tory conference of 1965, he outlined why we should give up our bases east of Suez.

The conference which loved him gave a long standing ovation. A newly arrived, prospective Tory hurried in and asked me: ‘Have you got a handout of Enoch’s speech? I gather he’s just taken us out of east of Suez and the conference got up and cheered like mad.’

It had indeed. It was left to the Press to explain to these Tories the next day what he had said.

Why can't we fight like the Finns?

Gallant little Finland — there’s a country to admire and not just for its famed toughness, as when it threw back the Soviet army in 1939. This time, Finnish voters are getting tough about the eurozone’s ambulance service for sick currencies.

Sunday’s elections saw the ‘True Finns’ vote soaring to nearly 20 per cent. Voters don’t like the idea of coughing up to save Portugal and Greece from their irresponsible spending. And since a contribution to the fund would require parliamentary endorsement, the hostile stance of two of the three main parties makes it unlikely to happen.

If Finland can have a vote on subsidising other countries’ spending, why not us? After all, we are pressed to contribute and are not even in the euro. We look to our own MPs to put this demand to ministers forcefully.

We may be, in a Victorian MP’s phrase, ‘the mother of parliaments’, but sometimes you wonder if the parent is setting a proper example.